We’ve visited the house twice since the last post, in fact I’m writing this one having just spent the day working there, but you’ll hear about that in the next post. Today I’ll share the updates from our last visit.

The framework making up the ‘landing’ has been completed and the remainder of the old gable has been removed. On the other side of the tarp is the beginnings of our balcony!

The wall between the landing and the bathroom has been erectedNow we can see the actual size of the bathroom

Not only have they finished the landing structure, but they’ve also got the bedroom up as well.

Our bedroom

Including the partition wall creating our walk-in wardrobe

Space for a few hangers…

The next surprise was that the wall and door under the main staircase have gone, opening up the hallway space and making the room feel so much bigger! Eventually we’ll have a glass balustrade instead.

Finally, we decided during our last visit that the empty doorway between the dining room and the sun-lounge wasn’t really how we wanted it to stay, so the pillars have now been removed leaving a much larger double-doorway.

In the summer the sun-lounge becomes like an oven and the lack of door means that the heat is passed straight into the dining room and raises the temperature of the house considerably. So we’re going to have some doors added in to regulate this somewhat. We just need to decide if they’ll be sliding doors, bifolds, or just regular doors!

The major work upstairs has started in the last week – parts of the roof have been taken out and the wall that will split the bedroom and landing has been started. Our fabulous builders are reusing as much of the original material as they can, so this wall is mostly being built out of chimney.

Before

Inside the gable end.

We were there briefly during the week this week, so were able to meet with the electrician and talk through the rewiring as well as seeing recent progress. The electrics are a bit of a mixed set at the moment (“Have you got an outside socket?” “Well, there’s a socket outside.” “Umm, that’s just an extension lead.” “Ah.”) so we are having the whole house rewired to modern standards. This also includes moving most of the light switches as we have moved some doorways and, because we’ve changed the use of rooms, will be changing which way doors open. Apparently we don’t need a shower pull in the middle of the kitchen either. It has been an interesting challenge trying to decide where we want plug sockets and lighting, especially with sockets in the kitchen, but we now have a plan to start with, even if it gets adjusted nearer the time.

The light switch next to that ex-doorway probably isn’t so useful any more.

Part of the importance of removing the chimney stack has been to allow us to turn the big room upstairs into a usable double bedroom, but the extension plans don’t stop there.

Views over the treetops.

We wanted to be able to make the most of the fabulous views from the back of the house, so we (Rob, mostly, with Sarah making encouraging noises) designed a full width extension to the back of the house. Rob’s proficiency on Sketch Up meant that it was easy to show our architect what we wanted when it came to him drawing up the plans.

Almost inevitably, we had to make some compromises in order to secure planning permission – this felt frustrating at the time, especially given the reasons the planning officer gave for the initial rejection – but we have essentially come out with what we wanted.

The biggest differences between the first and second planning drafts was that the extension now looks (from the outside) like a big dormer extension, rather than the initial asymmetrical roof we had planned. The planning officer also asked that we changed our originally-planned timber cladding for a tiled finish. What difference this makes, we don’t know, but she requested it, so we did it!

The other change to upstairs is that the bathroom is moving up there from downstairs, into one quarter of the upstairs space. The other available quarter will be a “landing” (so called so it doesn’t have to have a door to meet building regulations), leading on to a small balcony.

It doesn’t look much like a bathroom yet!

All this is yet to come – it looks very much like a building site up there at the moment. The lining of the ceiling is gone, as have the previous walls that gave storage in the eaves, so the next big step is for the roof to be taken off, but that requires scaffolding, so the builders are doing all the interior prep work in advance.

Work really feels like it has started now – the wall of the kitchen is gone (or, rather, is piled around the room waiting for the skip to be replaced) and as a result we’ve got a much clearer idea of the space.

Before…After the back wall has come down!

The door that used to lead from the bathroom in to the hall is staying where it is, but will be enlarged slightly to meet modern door measurements. To fit a basin into the downstairs loo (you can just about see it the toilet in the “after” picture above), the width of the room is being increased slightly, but as the wall is load-bearing, our fabulous builder has suggested an alternative that means that they don’t need to replace the wall entirely. Instead, they are going to cut a notch in the brickwork (you can see the pencil line on the wall) and adjust the spacing of the partition wall to allow for a basin.

When the house was originally built, the toilet was in a room on its own (as was the done thing at the time, apparently), but as fashions changed, the bathroom was knocked into one and the original toilet doorway blocked up and a cupboard built in opposite the toilet. The parquet flooring was left in place, making an interesting base for the cupboard!

Having been up to the house during Sarah’s half term means that we have been able to take these photos, but also gave us the chance to think more seriously about kitchen planning, which is quite exciting. Here is a sketch of our current thoughts, which will probably evolve somewhat before we order the final kitchen!

Any suggestions for layout changes gratefully received.

We have now visited a few kitchen showrooms too, so have a good idea about the style of unit and worktop that we want, but are holding off ordering anything until we’ve got the final measurements when the new walls are up. Hopefully we’ll be able to put in our order at Easter – until then, the tea and kettle have been relegated to the cellar!

Our builders have been hard at work for the last few days, and the fruits of their labours are evident. Where there once was a chimney, there’s now half a pile of rubble (which has now been moved – some to save, but a lot for the skip).

Looking down from upstairs

The change in the room is already pronounced, and we can see the huge change that this will have to the available space, particularly when the doorway is blocked up and so the room isn’t doubling up as a corridor.

The doorway on the left in this picture will be blocked off.

When we were clearing out the cellar, we found a box of spare parquet bricks, so when the chimney is gone completely we will be able to fill in the gap with matching bricks. We will be sanding back the floor (when all the brick dust is gone!) and bringing back the natural wood colours, but that job seems far off when we are looking at a pile of bricks!

The kitchen was always the hub of my Grandparents’ home. From breakfast around the slightly-too-big table, with Grandma and Granddad and fruit salad on cornflakes, to everyone pitching in after Christmas Dinner to clean all the plates and sort out the leftovers before we opened presents.

The view from the sink is wonderful!

I want it to play the same central role when we move in to the house, but with the opportunity to remodel, we are enlarging the space by knocking through into the downstairs bathroom (our main bathroom will be upstairs). This will create a separate space for a table without encroaching on the cooking area, lots of storage, and a fantastic long worktop for food preparation.

Original kitchen to living room view, front door on the right of the picture.

At the moment, the kitchen links onto the living room with an open doorway, but this will be blocked up and replaced with a door at the opposite end of the kitchen from the porch door, creating a through route to the main hallway.

The “front” door is a bit of an oddity – it’s very much at the side of the house, and you have to walk across the front of the house to get to it from the driveway. When Granddad first built the house, the front door was at the opposite side of the house to the kitchen and, as you might expect, opened on to a hallway. When he put the garage on the side of the house in the early 1960s, the natural main entrance moved to the kitchen, with a porch added in front of the kitchen door much more recently (it was one of those projects that kept being put back). To the eternal confusion of the postman, there appeared to be two front doors, complete with two letter boxes. We have simplified this slightly by replacing the front of the garage so removing the smaller garage door – hopefully this will mean we get half as much spam post!

It was very odd starting to dismantle the kitchen.

We stayed in the house last summer and, as well as sorting through my Grandparents’ possessions, we started to take apart some of the kitchen units. It was both great and sad to remember lots of family stories, but exciting to look forward to making new memories (and jam and cakes) when we live there.

My grandparents had a gas fire in their living room. This always caused great distress at Christmas – how would Father Christmas get in? Would he get stuck? Grandma solved this problem by showing us that the front door was left unlocked before we went to bed and the stockings we left by the hearth (presumably because that’s where Father Christmas was expecting them to be) were filled when we woke up in the morning.

Father Christmas would definitely have issues here, even ignoring all the pipework that’s behind the gas fire front.

The problem with the chimney, however, is the structure – which is fine downstairs, but runs from the cellar, up through the living room and then right through the centre of the bedroom upstairs. The result of this is that you can’t fit a double bed in the bigger bedroom upstairs, though you can (and we did) fit a single bed in each corner of the room.

An impossible jigsaw puzzle.

My grandparents had their bedroom downstairs, so this was never a problem for them, but we plan to use the upstairs room as our bedroom, so removing the chimney has been one of the first priorities of the build. The removal has been done this week, which is quite exciting, so we’ll share some pictures when we visit next week.